A Narco News White Paper

Reported from Venezuela

Narco
News '02

Authentic
Journalism on the "War on Drugs" in Latin America

"The Name
of Our Country is América" - Simón Bolívar

Free Nicolás
Rivera:

Journalist in Jail

Community
Media, the Voice of the

Venezuelan
People, Under Siege

Narco News Opens an
International Dialogue

About the Role of "Press
Freedom" Organizations

Part
I of a Series

Immedia
Summer 2002

By Al Giordano

On April 11th in
downtown Caracas, Radio Perola reporter Nicolás
Rivera, 26, was doing his job: reporting on two conflicting demonstrations
when the attempted assassination of a democratic government -
known as a coup d'etat - began in his country of Venezuela.

Nicolás heard the bangs of sniper gunfire from the
rooftops of a hotel and various office buildings as 18 civilians
from both sides of the nation's political divide were killed
and more than 150 were wounded. The violence, pre-planned by
the coup plotters, became the pretext by which military generals
then placed the elected president of the nation under arrest
and installed an oilman in his place. Nicolás collected
the facts and returned to Radio Perola's studios to report the
news of the coup d'etat underway. He worked around the clock
to get the facts out while the commercial media - as is now widely
recognized and undisputed - either made up knowingly false accounts
- "Chávez Resigned!" - or failed to report anything
at all.

After the shooting began, authorities of the government of
President Hugo Chávez immediately apprehended some of
the rooftop snipers who had lit the fuse to the violence. But
after Chávez himself was placed into custody later that
day by military generals, the rooftop assassins, whose identities
are still unknown, were incredulously set free by the dictatorship
of Pedro Carmona - and this tells us everything about which side
hired those snipers - as the dictator-for-a-day Carmona simultaneously
abolished the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution.
For a more detailed history of these events, in which the Venezuelan
people overthrew the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship within three
days and changed the history of our América, see "Three
Days that Shook the Media," (Narco News, April 18, 2002:
http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html
).

The following day, April 12th, as Nicolás was reporting
the facts from Radio Perola - one of the the non-profit Community
Radio and TV Stations that were legalized under the Venezuelan
Constitution of 1999 - the cops of Carmona's dictatorship busted
down the door to the radio station and grabbed him. The police
beat Nicolás, handcuffed him, and beat him some more.
They blindfolded him, dragged him to a vehicle, and beat him
even more. Then, these terrorists in uniform dragged him to his
house where his wife and two children were present.

His wife, Tibisay de Vivera, 25, tells Narco News what happened
next: "The police grabbed me by the hair and threw me to
the floor. They beat me, while they tortured Nicolás,
in front of our children. They said they were going to kill us.
They planted a bag of bullets on Nicolás and obligated
me to sign a statement they had already written or they would
kill our children, two and three years old."

Nicolás was then dragged, handcuffed, off to prison.
"On Sunday, the 14th, when Chávez returned, Nicolás
was released. His face was disfigured. He had been tortured.
And he had not been fed for two days."

And yet, not a single international "press freedom"
organization came to this journalist's aid or said a word about
the case.

A Savage Wave of
Attacks

There has been a
savage wave of attacks against Venezuela's Community Media journalists
ever since the April coup attempt. Those attacks, in the past
month, have increased.

And those self-proclaimed international defenders of press
freedom like the "Committee to Protect Journalists"
in New York, the "Inter-American Press Association"
in Miami and the Paris-based "Reporters Without Borders"
have remained suspiciously silent over every single attack on
Community Media by pro-coup forces within rogue police forces
and by agents of the discredited commercial media in Venezuela.

As part of this series, we will report the disturbing facts
about these three international organizations, their financial
backers, their "selective enforcement" favoring journalists
of certain political persuasions over others, and their negligence
regarding the real press freedom story in Venezuela.

But first, and more importantly, we'll report the news that
these organizations, apparently, don't want you to know: that
somewhere in a country called América, there is a non-profit
independent media - TV, radio, print and Internet - that has
won the hearts and minds of a public that, wisely, no longer
trusts the commercial media.

The Community Media movement in Venezuela, managed democratically
and on a local level by citizen volunteers, and strictly non-profit,
is now in direct competition with what used to be known as the
mass media, because the masses have changed the channel.

In the capital city alone, the populace is tuned in to seven
Community radio stations: Radio Perola, Radio Senderos ("Paths"),
Radio Free Catia, Radio Alí Primera (named after the late
radical folksinger of the Bolivarian revolution), Radio Rebelde
("Rebel"), Radio Comunitaria de La Vega, and Radio
Alternativa. The citizens in the capital also have two TV stations
of their own: Catia TV-e and Televisora of Southeast Caracas.

In the provinces, there is Radio CRP Miranda, TV Petare Mianda,
Teletambores ("TV Drums"). Aragua, TV Rubio Táchira,
TVC Rubio, Channel Z Zulia, Radio Miranda Zulia, TV Tarmas Vargas,
Radio Huayra Vargas, Radio Tarmeña Vargas, Radio Chuspa
Vargas, TV Michelena, Radio The Voice of Guaicaipuro Miranda,
Radio Yoraco Miranda, Radio San Diego Miranda, Radio Salvemos
la Montaña ("We Save the Mountain") Miranda,
Radio Free Tamunangue Lara... All in all, the country now boasts
nine Community TV stations and 16 Community radio stations, all
of them non-profit, all of them run by citizens, all of them
churning out better and more accurate journalism than the discredited
commercial media in this country, all 25 of them popular because
they are here not to sell products to the people but, rather,
as tools for the people's voice to be heard.

Nowhere on earth has a non-profit Community Media captured
the hearts, eyes and ears of the public as it has in Venezuela.
These authentic journalists have changed the history of media
in the early 21st century. They constitute a serious threat to
the dying monopoly of commercial and corrupted journalism, and
they have developed a model that can and should be studied and
replicated by independent media and authentic journalists worldwide.

That is why, kind readers, the Community Media of Venezuela
are under siege.

That is why the aforementioned "press freedom" organizations
abandoned them: because these organizations, as their actions
reflect, do not really favor a free press. They are merely selective
defenders of a caste system that favors a monopoly of the airwaves
by commercial and mercenary press. In two words, they favor a
"paid press" over a "free press."

And that is why the Narco News team - as the first Internet
journalists to win full First Amendment rights under United States
law in our December 2001 victory over
Banamex-Citigroup in the New York Supreme Court - today picks
up our court-validated press pass to defend our colleagues in
the Community Media movement in Venezuela.

And we launch an international dialogue among authentic journalists,
independent media, and press freedom advocates over the role
of the large international "press freedom" organizations
and the harm already caused to many journalists by their "selective
enforcement" and interpretation of what constitutes Freedom
of the Press.

What is at play in Venezuela is nothing less than the future
of press freedom.

Here are the facts.

Community Media

Under Siege

During the two-day
regime of dictator Pedro Carmona last April, at the
same time that his troops were beating and torturing Nicolás
Rivera of Radio Perola and his family, Carmona's police forces
also kicked down doors and raided Radio Catia Libre and Catia
TV in another popular barrio of Caracas. At TV Caricuao the troops
shut down the station and placed its staff, illegally, under
arrest. At the Catholic Church's popular broadcaster, Radio Fe
y Alegria ("Radio Faith and Happiness"), the troops
ordered the staff to play only music and to not report any news
of the events that were shaking the country, or they would be
shut down, too.

Carmona's troops also invaded and shut down the national public
TV station - Channel 8.

Meanwhile, the commercial media, as has been widely reported
and documented, ordered a complete news blackout, including at
the Cisneros family's Venevisión network - the largest
TV company in the nation - owned by a close friend of George
H.W. Bush, Sr., who had visited Cisneros in Venezuela last year,
purportedly for a fishing trip.

The Human Rights group PROVEA (the Venezuelan Education-Action
Program on Human Rights), on April 13th, reported that, "A
journalist who asked not to be identified, the Production Chief
of one of the principal TV channels in the country, denounced
that the directors of the company impeded the journalists from
transmitting information about the current events."

In place of news during the most newsworthy events in the
nation's history, the big TV chains played "Tom and Jerry"
cartoons, movies and re-runs.

The role of Internet journalists in breaking the information
blockade outside of Venezuela was the subject of our April 18th
report. But within Venezuela, only the Community Media journalists
stood between democracy and dictatorship, and they saved the
day.

During those days of crisis last April, the journalists of
the Community Media in Venezuela got to work reporting the true
facts - that masses of people from the popular barrios were coming
down from the hills and taking back the Capital and other cities,
street by street, building by building, and media by media. And
it was only because of the Community Broadcasters at independent
media like Catia TV and Radio Catia Libre that the public had
any idea that the counter-coup underway in their own neighborhoods
was happening, simultaneously, like a lightning bolt of democracy,
throughout the city and the nation. The minority of Venezuelan
homes that had cable TV got some, albeit distorted, news from
CNN and international news agencies that there was resistance
to the coup, but those reports were slow and left in the dust
by the rapid-fire factual reporting of the Community Media in
Venezuela and the international independent Online Press.

A key turning point for the people's counter-coup came when
Public Television Channel 8 returned to the airwaves. Again,
according to Venezuela's top telecommunications official, it
was the journalists of the Community Media movement who retook
the censored national TV station and moved it back onto the airwaves.

During an April 26th press conference, a reporter asked Jesse
Chacón, the director of the National Telecommunications
Commision (CONATEL, in its Spanish acronym), "how was Channel
8 regained?"

"That is owed, in great measure, to the help given by
Community Broadcaster Catia TV," answered Chacón.
"Its people were already taking great risks, among them
their lives, but they helped to retake the transmitter. Their
lives were in danger throughout those days. Their own headquarters
had been raided. They succeeded in escaping. They took their
cameras and stayed mobile, as did the people from Radio Perola.
There was a very fierce persecution against them, something that
has not been reported in the daily newspapers."

The Attacks of

the Past Month

On June 20th, the
day that your correspondent arrived in Caracas, the large commercial
TV stations - and the daily El Nacional and El Universal
in the nation's capital - were openly attempting to provoke a
second coup attempt, trumpeting a march for that day by military
generals and other officers for the removal of Chávez,
the elected president.

But the march - predicted and publicized by the commercial
media as a massive act that would spark military officers to
undertake a new coup attempt - fizzled. Only 1,300 people attended.
And instead of the promised wave of military officers in uniform,
just two retired generals brought their uniforms and, at that,
carried them in front of their bodies on coat hangers.

At a press conference the following day attended by Narco
News, President Chávez thanked the retired officers for
their restraint in not wearing, as the commercial media had egged
them on to do, their uniforms in a partisan political act.

"Some political sectors have picked up the military theme
and it has taken up space in the media," said Chávez
to a group of 40 international correspondents on April 21st.
"Some opposition members don't have serious proposals. We
don't have serious political opponents. Where are they? Where
is their political leadership? Thus, the military theme has been
raised To play with the military in this way is to play
with fire."

June 20th marked the day it became clear to everyone in Venezuela:
The commercial media had lost its convocatory power to move even
the uppermost classes of oligarchy into the streets. Your correspondent
watched as the remnants of that day's march, gathered in Altimira
Plaza, dwindled to a couple hundred demonstrators, then a hundred,
then fifty or so, and then came a brief rain, and their mobilization
simply disappeared, as if washed down the drainage pipes of the
capital city.

The shock to the pro-coup minority in Venezuela was palpable.
They were angry and disheartened. One man, who declined to be
identified, told this reporter: "We must kill Chávez,
his vice president and everybody who supports him. We need a
civil war. But," he sighed, "it can't happen yet."
Within ten days, though, the minority opposition, through rogue
elements of the Police Security and Intelligence Division (DISIP,
in its Spanish initials, known in Venezuela as "the political
police") and other police forces linked to the opposition
that had been part of the original coup attempt last April, launched
a concerted series of attacks upon the ones they blame for the
collapse of the commercial media's power to provoke a coup: The
Community Media.

In the past month, these attacks have included:

- The June 28th incarceration, a second time, of Nicolás
Rivera, the Radio Perola journalist, who has now been falsely
accused of shooting from the Llaguno Bridge on April 11th (where
he was armed with a tape recorder, not a gun). Nicolás
remains in prison today.

- A smear campaign against Catia TV, initiated by various
large commercial media outlets (Globovision and El Nacional,
among others demonstrating, even as they incredibly cry that
their own "press freedom" is threatened by the public
hostility they have provoked against themselves, that they seek
to deny press-freedom rights to the non-profit Community Media).

- Threats to evict Catia TV from its studios atop a public
hospital by the greater metropolitan area Mayor Alfredo Peña,
a coup supporter whose police forces were among the shock troops
of the April coup attempt.

- A smear campaign against alternative Internet media by
El Nacional.

- A public demand by Miguel Angel Martínez, president
of the private-sector Chamber of Radio Broadcasters - and one
of the signers of the April 12th coup decree, abolishing Congress
and the Constitution, with the dictator Carmona - that the Community
TV and radio stations are "illegal," should be shut
down, and that his affiliated commercial radio stations should
"interfere" with the frequencies of the Community Media
during the next coup attempt.

- A raid last week against non-profit Community Broadcaster
Radio Sendero de Antímano in another Caracas neighborhood
by the same rogue political police forces of the DISIP (these
pro-coup police factions are known, in the country, as "anillos
negros," or "black rings," and the Chávez
government so far remains unable to control them.

"In an operation never before seen, not even when the
dictator Carmona was placed under arrest, 20 patrol cars and
15 police motorcycles arrived at the radio station looking for
explosives. According to the police, the operation was owed to
a legal complaint filed by a teacher in the school from where
the radio station broadcasts. The police 'found' in one of the
classrooms (far from the radio studio) a knapsack with a used
smoke-bomb and a broken bulletproof jacket. However, as a result
of this unjustified operation, compañeros Jorge Quintero,
Lenín Méndez and another journalist from the radio
station have been arrested. This sudden arrest and raid form
part of a complex strategy of persecution and terrorism unleashed
against Venezuelan Community Media. We call upon different sectors
of the Venezuelan and international community to declare themselves
against these innumerable attacks of which the media, whose only
crime has been to bring voice to the popular sectors, is the
victim."

The second arrest of Nicolás Rivera, on June 28th,
was particularly brutal and bizarre in its circumstances.

Narco News contacted his wife, Tibisay de Vivero, who was
present, to ask what had happened.

"On June 28th, my husband and I, with our lawyer, went
to the offices of the PTJ (the Technical Judicial Police) to
file a criminal complaint against the officers who had tortured
Nicolás during the coup," she explained. "The
attorney had called ahead and made an appointment with the officer
in charge of receiving this kind of complaint. But when we got
to the police station, the officer wasn't there. No one would
attend to us. Instead, they arrested Nicolás and charged
him with homicide, resisting arrest and possession of a firearm.
Now they say he was shooting people when he was reporting on
April 11th. He's still a prisoner today, an innocent person arrested
for something that in reality he did not do. It's unjust. We
are waiting to see what happens."

We asked: "Between the date of Nicolás' first
arrest on April 12th and his second arrest on June 28th, did
any international press-freedom organization contact you?"

Former Boston Phoenix Political Reporter Al Giordano reports
on the drug war and democracy from Latin America. He is publisher
of The Narco News Bulletin - www.narconews.com
-- and receives email at narconews@hotmail.com

About this series:

Last month, Narco News publisher Al Giordano traveled to Venezuela
to investigate and report on the political situation and, specifically,
the role of the media - commercial and community - in the April
coup, counter-coup, and the continuing history of the country's
democracy. He interviewed hundreds of sources from the popular
neighborhoods, the media, the opposition and the Chávez
administration.

This series will include reports on the history of the Community
Media movement in Venezuela as told by its own journalists and
participants, and an analysis of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution's
guarantee of press freedom rights to all citizens, not just the
commercial media caste (Venezuela's new laws legalizing non-profit
Community TV and Radio are the most progressive of any country
in the world and we will translate the key provisions for distribution
and use in other countries.)

The series will also include reports on two days spent covering
President Hugo Chávez: His June 21 press conference with
foreign correspondents (which lasted almost four hours) and his
June 23 live nationwide broadcast from the headquarters of Community
TV station Catia TV, where for five hours the president took
calls from the public and questions from a studio audience of
36 representatives of the Community Media throughout Venezuela.

This series will also explore the modus operandi of the three
wealthiest international "press freedom" organizations
- The "Committee to Protect Journalists" in New York,
the "Inter-American Press Association" in Miami and
the Paris-based "Reporters Without Borders" - and how
each of these organizations has betrayed their own self-stated
missions with their simulated and partial statements regarding
the events this year in Venezuela.

Today, we are sending this first installment of the series
to representatives of each of these three international organizations,
will offer them a chance to respond to questions about their
funding and its relation to their stances regarding press freedom
issues in Venezuela, and attempt to begin a long-overdue dialogue
- in full public view - with the spokespersons for these groups
about their selective definitions of "press freedom,"
particularly as it regards defense of commercial media over non-profit
community journalism. We hope these organizations will enter
into this dialogue in a spirit of self-critique and correction,
and that they will become more accountable for their actions
as a result.

We also issue a call to the global networks of Independent
Media and Authentic Journalism to join in this dialogue about
what truly constitutes Freedom of the Press and how it is best
defended and expanded. Please join in the conversation. Send
your letters, comments, questions and criticisms to our immedia
working group at salonchingon@hotmail.com

This series is part of the Narco News Immedia Summer 2002
project. For more information see our June 1st report: "The
Masses vs. The Media: A Revolution for a Narcotized Society"
- http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html